Antiversities

There are several local ones to remember around here. None of them particularly good.

January 28-February 1- 30th anniversary of the Blizzard of '77

I was far away at the time, but Eddie Hosek, one of my hangout buds at Modells, knew some kids who went to UB and he regaled us with their up-close tales of what this experience was really like.

Hey, kids! Try this at home!

(1) Take a quart-size Tupperware container (elliptical would be best, but use your imagination if you've just got rectangular).
(2) Fill it with water and freeze it.
(3) When it's good and frozen, cover the top of the ice with about half an inch of flour.
(4) At the two short ends of the ellipse/rectangle, place a piece of cardboard at one end and a window fan at the other, aimed to blow over the bowl.
(5) Put the fan on "high."

See that mess up against the cardboard? Well, that was us. The bowl was Lake Erie, frozen solid, and the flour represented the two feet of snow which had fallen on top of the ice over a period of several weeks. The fan was the pissed-off voice of God, blowing a two-foot high accumulation stretching all the way back to Toledo onto the first land it could find its way to. Some of it passed to the north, but hardly any of it reached as far as Rochester.

Most of it landed here, quite a bit of it in front of this odd little access road which goes under the main runway at the B-lo airport:

I drove through that tunnel yesterday. It was a little easier to get out.


There have been some bad ones here since then which I experienced in all their glory- the 1984 Jimmy Griffin "six-pack" storm, the pre-Thanksgiving daylong bomb in 2000, the seven feet in a week around Christmas the following year and of course our little "surprise" this past October- but the Blizzard still holds the top spot in terms of death, destruction and sheer force of nature.

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January 27, 2007- 16 years since Super Bowl XXV

It's easy to forget the exact date of this event, since the game didn't get pushed into early February as it does now. Yet for Buffalonians, the end of that game- when their heavily favored Bills lost on a last-minute comeback by the Giants and, then, a missed final field goal attempt- will always live in infamy. Tens of thousands of Bills fans rallied in Niagara Square later that week to cheer the accomplishments of the team even in defeat, and the kicker got the loudest ovation. Later losses were not so nearly appreciated.

The occasion came back to me just now reading this news item:

R&B Singer Brandy Faces Charges in Vehicular Death

A few paragraphs in, you find out that her real last name is Norwood. "No wonder she crashed her car," said 400,000 Bills fans crying out in terror and suddenly silenced. "She hooked it wide right."

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This week is also the 59th anniversary of the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the 21st anniversary of the Challenger disaster, and the 400th anniversary of a suspected tsunami in the Bristol Channel which killed 2,000 Britons on this date in 1607.

Last orders, everyone:)

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Speaking of Britain: the icon du jour comes from a show I only yesterday pimped to one of my Veddy British Friends here: the BBC's House of Cards trilogy, starring Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart ("FU" to his friends and worse names than that to his many enemies), perhaps the most Machiavellian of world leaders ever created by womb or word. Sadly, he's best known in this country (the notes on the video even say so) for being the rich guy in the back of the Rolls who asks, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" (Sigh. One more reason for me to want to get more than my passport renewed by the time the new rules kick in.)  The text in the icon is perhaps FU's most famous line, one that has actually made it into the real-life world of politics as a category of non-denial denial known as "Urquhart's Avoidance."